FREMONT, CA: As the significance of Docker containers in cloud environment gains more traction in the enterprise tech market, Google finds allies in Microsoft, IBM, Red Hat, Docker, CoreOS, Mesosphere, and SaltStack who will be actively participating as members of the community of ‘Kubernetes’ – Google’s open source manager for Docker container used at the internet scale. These companies are climbing the bandwagon to leverage this open source technology while contributing to bolster its functionality as an open management framework.

The Docker container is essentially a Linux container which fair better in terms of their seamless integration with diverse developer environments compared with traditional virtualization model. This feature finds more acceptance than the traditional virtualization concept which is high on resource requirements for hosting applications in distributed environments. Increased mobility for the workload is another major benefit of these containers.

The container when deployed on a remote host server looks for the Linux kernel that the application needs. In case it finds the Linux kernel, it loads on to that server with its own operating system residing in the container. By producing low overhead and sharing certain portions of the host kernel and operating system instance, a container is basically a lightweight alternative to the legacy virtual machine.

VMs carry the entire operating system over to the host machine which is quite pricey on the host’s resources. Hence VMs means increased demand for resource utilization. On the contrary, linux container makes way for running a complete copy of the operating system without the overhead of running a level-2 hypervisor such as Virtual Box. The container shares the kernel with the host system making its processes and file system transparent to the host. These containers bring in greater efficiency with their agile portability of application instances over the hybrid cloud environment.

Google’s Kubernetes is developed as an extensible, portable framework for managing Docker workloads. It lets customers manage their applications efficiently. Predictable deployments, simple scalability, enhanced portability are some of the points where this open framework scores high. Apart from these benefits, the customers could also avoid vendor lock-in and run containers of their choice in the cloud.

Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President of the Cloud and Enterprise group at Microsoft said that the company is looking forward to help its customers to easily manage containers that can run on any remote host enabling building of multi-cloud solutions including targeting Microsoft Azure.

Red Hat is contributing to get Kubernetes on the open hybrid cloud. “Red Hat has a rich history of contributing to and maturing innovative, open source projects. Through this collaboration with Google on Kubernetes, we are contributing to the evolution of cloud computing and helping deliver the promises that container technologies offer to the open hybrid cloud,” says Paul Cormier, President, Products and Technologies at Red Hat.

With an eye on enterprise-grade containers and open governance model, IBM comes brings its technical expertise to Kubernetes and the broader Docker ecosystem. Docker is providing the full container stack which will be used Kuberetes for scheduling. The company is looking forward to align the Kubernetes framework with Libswarm.